Blair Aide Campbell Accuses Mail, Mirror of Breaking Laws

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s head
of communications for most of his time as prime minister, said
he believed British newspapers other than those owned by News
Corp. had broken the law to get stories.

Appearing before an inquiry into U.K. media standards
prompted by the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone,
Campbell conceded he had no firm evidence to support his
suspicions. He pointed to Associated Newspapers Ltd.’s Mail
newspapers and Trinity Mirror Plc’s Mirror as having obtained
stories that left he and his colleagues “scratching our heads
saying, ‘How the hell did that get out?’”

Campbell said that, in light of the number of stories about
Cherie Blair that were published, he accused her assistant
Carole Caplin of leaking stories several times. Caplin has since
been told her phone was hacked, he said. His testimony is the
latest to suggest other newspaper groups were involved in the
kind of illegality that led New York-based News Corp. to close
the News of the World tabloid in July.

“The Mail has continuously refuted any allegations of
phone hacking, or paying anyone else to hack phones,” Oliver
Lloyd, a spokesman for the Daily Mail, said in a telephone
interview.

Rupert Smith, a spokesman for Trinity, said all the
company’s journalists “work within the criminal and the PCC
code of conduct.”

‘Very Concerned’

“With Cherie Blair in particular, she was turning up at
places and the press was finding out about it,” Campbell said.
“We were very concerned about how many stories about Cherie and
Carole were getting out to various bits of the media.”

Campbell cited the Mirror’s 1999 scoop that Cherie Blair
was pregnant as an example of a story he couldn’t figure out how
the paper obtained.

Campbell said he saw invoices showing the Mirror paid
Jonathon Rees, a private detective who was jailed for planting
drugs on someone, to investigate him.

“I do not know the stories he was pursuing, so cannot
judge either whether a ‘normal’ journalist would have been
unable properly to investigate,” Campbell said in written
evidence to the inquiry.

Former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain today said he
had hired Charlotte Harris, a lawyer at Mishcon de Reya, to
represent him over allegations his computer was hacked. His
office said in an e-mailed statement that he had spoken to
police about the claims today.